‘I already told you, there is no “us”,’ he snapped, his fingertips curling round the top of the steering wheel, tightening. ‘I fell in love with you once. It’s not a mistake I intend to repeat.’

She stared at him, pummelled by the words. She’d been a mistake to him? ‘Did you plan it all? All this?’

‘Did I what?’

‘You must have known it was me you were coming to see. Rosie would have given you my details. I was sitting there waiting for Dr Ferrante. But you – you knew it was me you were coming to meet.’ She watched him, seeing how his grip tightened on the wheel. ‘How long have you been waiting to hurt me back? All that time?’

‘I haven’t been waiting.’ He looked across at her, their eyes connecting even as the car bumped along on the rough track. He shrugged. ‘I did it because I could.’

The coldness of his words took her breath away. She had been that easy to play? She had meant nothing at all . . . ? The tears slid treacherously from the corners of her eyes but she couldn’t stop them.

He looked away again, his expression setting harder still.

‘Has what I did really tormented you that much, that you’re prepared to sacrifice your own family, everything that’s good in your life, just for the chance to get back at me?’ she cried. ‘Was it worth potentially losing them . . . ?’ The words fell from her, torn from her lips, as she suddenly lurched forwards, her head almost hitting the dash as the car came to a sudden stop. The smell of burning rubber came to her nose and she saw the car had stopped at a skewed angle.

‘I’m not losing anything. Not for you. Not again.’

She looked at him in bafflement. The bumper was inches from an old dry stone wall. Had he almost crashed the car to win a fight?

‘I didn’t ask for any of this, okay?’ he snapped. ‘I didn’t want you back in my life and I didn’t go looking for it. I don’t want to be here now and I don’t want you to be here. I don’t even know why you are here! Why are you here?’ He threw out his hands in utter exasperation. ‘You’re not a researcher! You can’t help! Why the fuck are you here?’

His anger shook her to the core; she had never seen him angry before, not even that day, the last day . . . ‘Because the client asked me to be,’ she said quietly.

He said nothing for a moment, his eyes roaming her face with a dark expression that left her frozen in its wake; even her tears had stopped mid-track. How had she not seen any of this, lying in his arms? How could she have blinded herself to the truth of what they were now, strangers determined to hurt and wound one another, to inflict death by a thousand cuts.